Free pizza for reading books
Absolutely!
Growing up in New Haven, we knew from an early age that Pizza Hut was fast food slop that barely deserved the label pizza, but them supporting reading like that plus the old school buffet style salad bar meant we were there far more often than the place deserved.
Stuffed crust, maybe dessert pizza. Those are the only two reasons we ever ate there.
Place in my hometown had a playground. Ancient ass location that apparently my dad basically lived at when he was in highschool.
But the slide was a rack of metal rolling pins you slid down. Not exactly an innovation to pizza but that thing was amazing at catching kid’s fingers. Like holy damn could it mess up your hand, I think it deserves an honorable mention. It did not last into the 2000s.
Reading this just unlocked a core memory for me. I have no idea where it was, but I can remember going to a playground as a kid that had a slide that was also just rollers. Flinging myself down them to try and go as fast as possible, fingers getting caught between rollers, the zipper of an unzipped coat also getting caught between the rollers, trying to run on the bottom part of the slide where it was flat only to fall and get flung to the ground by the already spinning rollers…
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to let children play on those?
Would you have changed a thing tho, nostalgically speaking?
Honestly, I don’t know. The most fun memories I have as a kid were when I was messing around with or on things I shouldn’t have been near at all, but god damn were there a lot of injuries that could have been prevented if something like the roller slide were replaced with a regular slide. But then I probably would have found some other way to hurt myself
Sick! Yeah they made some wild shit back then. Was bummed to see stuff like it go but on the other hand I did witness some epic wipeouts on questionable architecture
What piza stuff did you like there tho that was sort of trailblazing
Hmmm, other commenter here already mentioned the desert pizza. That was kind of a family tradition after church. I think that location was also one of the first places in town to offer a Chicago deep dish (there was a hubbub about it, very small town, the other pizza places were very unadventurous). I think I tried anchovies there for the first time, but that’s only notable since concept restaurants kind of stopped serving them after the 2000s
I think their pan pizza was pretty different than anything you could really get anywhere else at the time, at least from a chain. It’s absolutely delicious served straight out of the hot pan.
Besides the stuffed crust, I can tell you from working there that everything is made from the same dough. Pizza, breadsticks, cinnamon bites, it’s all the same dough drowned in “butter oil”. The one exception was their thin crust which got special treatment and no butter oil.
What do you think it would take for them to turn things around and become successful again?
It’s been ages since I ate from there, but my first guess is lower prices. They were expensive when I worked there many years ago, even with the 50% employee discount. I can only imagine how things must be now.
They could also offer slices rather than just whole pizzas. Small pizza shops really have that part figured out. Maybe they do that now, I wouldn’t know.
